I wrote this in 2017-18 just on a whim, just for fun.
Steven was absolutely enchanted by Joel. He was easy-going, confident, deep, filled with conviction, and said what needed to be said. Pretty much the opposite of everything he thought about himself. He saw himself as hesitant, timid, and reserved.
That all changed when he put on his lab coat, however. In the lab, he was a titan, an innovator. A god.
Everything he was and hoped to be in life revolved around his unquenchable love and adoration of biochemistry. There was nothing else in the universe as important, as fascinating, or as influential. As one of his professors gloriously proposed:
“In the end, we’re all just a series of chemical impulses moving through a system of exponentially smaller pieces of matter. The more vigorously and relentlessly we study the smaller parts of matter, the greater our understanding of the human race becomes. And what’s more important than understanding the place of humanity in an infinite universe? And...what’s more powerful than being able to affect change on the molecular or atomic levels? Imagine what it would be like to be God! You can be, future scientists, if you devote yourself radically to your craft. You can heal. You can harm. You hold life itself in the palms of your hands. Become the radicals you’re meant to be.”
We can be gods. The power of life and death in the palms of our hands. I hold life and death in the palms of my hands.
As fate would have it, Joel was also a scientist, although somewhat of a different one than Steven. It was one of their biggest jokes, the friendly competition between scientists. Steven claimed his study was much more noble, much more educated. Joel would always retort that Steven could go straight to hell.
Joel was a social scientist. He studied people; their behavior, patterns, habits. But he didn’t just study. He created. He influenced. He experimented. In his view, people were cattle. Germs under the microscope to be poked at, prodded, herded. He made it sound a lot more sophisticated, of course, when telling people his job, but at the end of the day, that’s pretty much how he felt about what he did and who he was.
His area of discipline was manipulating people. Specifically groups of people. He became obsessed with mass manipulation after experiencing it first-hand as a child while attending an extreme fundamentalist church with his family. The abuses he endured during those years forever crystallized in him the need to understand the human will - and how to protect, destroy, and otherwise bend all others to his. He had become the potter. Everyone else was his clay.
One night, about six months into their relationship, Steven came home to find two guests sharing wine with Joel in front of the gas fireplace in their living room. The male was older and very European-looking. Steven was immediately struck by the stoic coldness that seemed to envelop him. It was almost as if the man was generating his own personal Arctic atmosphere. He could almost see the mist as he exhaled, the chill was so palpable.
“If Hitler had a pin up calendar of the Third Reich, this guy would be Mr. November,” Steven thought. He made Steven very uncomfortable. It was almost as if the man was observing him under a microscope, like Steven was some kind of biological mass squirming around a petri dish.
As cold as the strange man was, the female was the fire to his ice. Everything about her screamed passion, desire, heat. Steven was undoubtedly gay, but if this woman were to come on to him for some reason, he already determined it would be very hard to turn her away.
There was something about her smell that was driving him crazy, like some exotic madness had wafted up his nose and was speaking strange and enticing things to the very fabric of his manhood. He knew right away that he was being influenced by her expert use of pheromones, which he studied at length in animals of all kinds.
Many creature, including humans, emit chemical signals that invisibly communicate primitive messages to other creatures. There are danger pheromones that tell other creatures to stay away; territorial pheromones to mark a location or object; trail pheromones, such as found in ants and caterpillars, to mark a particular path; and sex pheromones, which act as unseen aphrodisiacs, drawing the opposite sex towards each other.
Research and experiments on intentional pheromone manipulation - including studies he himself had completed - had lead to the creation of cosmetic products - with names like “Pure Instinct” and “Naughty Secrets” - that now were on the open market. They saw promising sales among clubbers, ravers, singles, and people in general who were looking to get laid easier
Although he understood biologically what they were and how powerful they could be, at this moment, the knowledge and logic he possessed were of no value. His walls of defense were completely down, crumbled, destroyed by the invisible scent that was emanating intoxicatingly from this strange, mysterious creature. He couldn’t recall having ever felt such a strong desire. It was as if he was a bystander watching himself react in ways he never would have thought possible.
“Steven, I’d like you to meet a couple of people I work with,” said Joel. Motioning to Mr. November with an outstretched hand, he said “this is Anders,” and then to the woman, “and this is Sophia.” Grinning, he added, “they’re real scientists like me.”
“It’s nice to meet you both,” Steven said, although he was pretty sure he was lying about meeting at least one of them. The other, he had determined, could do whatever she wanted to with him, and it sure as hell was nice to meet her. “I’m going to go put my stuff down, settle in, grab a glass of wine, and then I’ll be right back out to join you.”
Joining Steven in the kitchen, Joel, speaking in a low voice, said “Sorry I didn’t tell you ahead of time they were here. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing. You OK with them being here?”
“Yeah, it’s no sweat.”
“Good. I think you’ll find them fascinating. I’ve told them a ton about you.”
“Greeeat...all bad, right?”
“You know it!” Joel said, chuckling.
Rejoining the two near the fire, the four of them settled into cordial, ice-breaking conversation, which quickly turned into careers, achievements, politics, and musings on the future of the human race. Steven was surprised at how much they all had in common, but also comforted and validated that he wasn’t alone in his views and philosophies.
“Humanity, although capable of incredible brilliance, is the biggest blight on Mother Nature,” proclaimed Anders with unveiled disdain. “We take and we break and we revel in our depravity and ignorance. Our appetite for the meaningless is insatiable. No other creature on earth wastes the way we do. We waste our time, our resources, our relationships, our energy...and for what? To build a bigger home? To buy a nicer TV or newer car?”
“Those things aren’t bad, in and of themselves,” interjected Steven. “I like driving my Audi. It makes me feel accomplished. If I cared about TV or watched it a lot, I’d want the best one that I could afford. Materialism can be a nice thing if you can keep it in perspective.”
Anders flashed him a piercing look but quickly softened, and in his slightly accented English responded “Very true, my young friend, and if the consequences of your materialism were limited to you alone, then I would say do whatever it was that made you happy. Buy, spend, fuck, indulge in whatever you desire to your heart’s content.”
He paused and took a gulp of wine. “The reality, however, is that for every action, there exists the butterfly effect. What you do here,” he raised his glass and gestured it around Steven’s apartment “isn’t happening in a bubble. The electricity we’re using - it has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? Somewhere, someone dug up the coal from the ground and emptied it into a dump truck or train car. That truck or train took it to a power plant where it was burned to make electricity. That power plant takes men and women to operate it. Those men and women use other machines that take energy to operate just to turn that coal into more energy. That energy is then sent through electrical lines - which are more than likely owned and maintained by someone else, by the way - right into your home. And you’re just one home out of millions upon millions.”
“All of these people, free to pursue the desires of their heart, create a complex web of supply and demand, actions and reactions. I’m afraid we’ve reached a point in human history where demand is exceeding supply, and reactions are reverberating through our fabric like the warning tremors before catastrophic earthquakes. If you’re honest with yourself, you can feel exactly what I’m talking about.”
By this point, he was staring intently, unwaveringly at Steven, as if he was speaking directly to his soul. The room was still, as if the air molecules had stopped moving. The only sound was the quiet hissing of the fireplace. “You sense it, don’t you? A thick, pregnant precursor to impending doom. If you don’t, it’s because you choose not to. You choose to look away. This thing is too big to look at and yet not recognize.”
He put his glass down. Looking at his fingernails, and then carefully back at Steven, he said “The truth is, Steven, the world needs shepherds. The sheep are billions, and they’re wandering aimlessly to and fro across this planet, trampling it, polluting it, and they need borders. They need someone to tell them where to go, who to be, how to think, how to act.”
Steven sat mesmerized as the Anders went on. “This complex system of individual freedom doesn’t work on a global level. If the world is to go on, it needs architects and guides. The idea of individual freedom and liberty no longer is relevant in a world that no longer has borders. Planning on a global scale isn’t just a good idea, it’s an absolute necessity for the survival of the human race.”
With icy blue eyes fixed unwaveringly on Steven, he asked “So what’s it going to be, Steven? Are you going to continue to be a sheep? Or are you prepared to make the next evolution and become one of the shepherds?”
Steven noticed two things. The first is that Joel and Sophia were staring at him as well, unblinking and fully focused, like they had turned to wax statues. The second thing he noticed was that the blood seemed to have drained from his entire body, as if a vampire had claimed it all at some point in the last ten minutes, unbeknownst to him.
Yet he also felt a sense of completeness, as if these words, articulated this way, had turned some kind of genetic tumbler inside of himself. It was as if he always was meant to hear this conversation, and he’d been walking around, waiting for it to tap him on the shoulder.
As he spoke, his voice cracked. Taking a long swallow of wine, he finally said “Well, that’s not your typical surface level party banter, is it?” He laughed nervously, and then relaxed when he saw Joel and Sophia crack half smiles and lean back in their chairs. Anders, however, remained stone cold, intently staring right into Stevens soul, obviously waiting for some kind of answer.
Cautiously - and a little defensively, Steven replied “Uh, I definitely don’t want to be one of the sheep, but I’m not sure what you’re asking. I mean, I vote the right way. I probably read some of the same papers and magazines you do. I work hard in the lab to produce solutions to benefit the greater good. What is it that YOU’RE doing that’s different from me? How are YOU a shepherd?”
Just then a thought occurred to him. Looking to Joel and then Sophia, he asked, “How about you guys? Joel? Are you a shepherd?” Then another, stranger thought struck him. “Is this like some sort of secret society or something? Are you guys Freemasons? Or the Illuminati?”
Joel got up from where he was seated across the room and sat down on the couch beside Steven, as if to reassure him that he was still among friends wasn’t in any danger. Putting an arm around his shoulder, Joel soothingly said “Forget about all that stuff for a minute. And please, I’m going to ask you to be very open-minded here with what I’m about to say.”
As he was speaking, he began subtly nodding his own head up and down. “I want you to think very long and hard before you say anything or make any judgments, OK?” Steven returned the nod but said nothing.
“We, the three of us,” Joel said, gesturing around the room, “are a part of something...global. Something very...progressive that the regular person will never know about. That they can’t know about. For their own good, I might add. AND the good of their children and grandchildren.” Joel grinned his thousand watt smile. “We good so far?”
“Yeah, I’m listening,” Steven said, poker faced. He glanced at Anders and Sophia, finding poker faces of their own staring back at him.
“Good. I’m going to speak very bluntly. We’re part a network of, to put it extremely mildly, very concerned individuals who understand that the world can’t continue in the direction it’s going. We’re a collection of some of the top minds, talents, and unique abilities on the planet.”
“See, as Anders alluded to,” Joel nodded to Anders, “the world needs shepherds. The future needs to be molded and shaped, captained by those of us with the intellect and foresight to keep this ship from capsizing. If history has proven anything at all, it’s that leaving the fate of the planet up to chance, to billions of individuals doing whatever the hell they want, is a disaster. So while they sleepwalk on the surface, we - the awoken...the enlightened - work in the shadows, behind the scenes, to systematically evolve the human race so that we can steer the ship away from fatal danger.”
Steven shifted uncomfortably in his seat and removed Joel’s arm from around his shoulder. “So there’s gotta be a reason you’re telling me this. Why tell me all of this? It’s not that I don’t believe you. It’s not crazy. In fact, the more you talk about it, the more it makes total sense. But again, what’s this have to do with me? Are you recruiting me right now into this...movement or whatever you want to call it?”
Joel smiled again. “Man, Steve, you don’t miss a trick, do you?” Chuckling to break up the tension, he said “You’re an unbelievably smart guy, a brilliant scientist, and a person with a genuinely good heart. You could be a tremendous asset to our efforts. I know you probably have a lot of questions, and I’m here to help. Initially though, first impression, are you open to taking your life in a different, more meaningful direction than you ever thought possible? Because that’s what we’re talking about here. Your life will never be the same.”
Steven sank back into the couch cushions and exhaled deeply. His mocha skin had turned several shades lighter. This bizarre night had come out of nowhere. He was standing on the bank of a wild river, and if he jumped in, he had no idea where it would take him. Was the riverbank really what he wanted? Could he really pass on the unknown journey towards something that would forever shape the future of mankind? He thought about the confidence that Joel had, that the other three in this room seemed to have, and it was something he wanted with all of his heart.
Before he really knew it, he heard himself saying, “I’m in.”
There was a momentary silence, followed by movement. Sophia came over and sat down on the other side of Steven, wine glass still in her hand. Her dark, probing eyes were locked on his, and she had an odd smile on her lips. Her scent was enough to make Steven almost physically bite down on his knuckle. She leaned in so close to his ear that when she spoke, her tongue brushed it, causing electricity to shoot through his entire body, right to his groin.
In a hushed voice, just above a whispered, almost cooing, she said, “I’m so excited to hear you say that. Now I don’t have to kill you!” Turning his face with her free hand, she licked his temple with the tip of her tongue. Then she patted his arm, and eyes still locked on him, broke into a thousand-watt grin of her own.
“What did I just get myself into?”
Now, a little over five years later, sitting there on the patio, drinking his mineral water, he knew he’d made the right decision. What he was carrying in his pocket was about to set in motion the next phase of an historic global event that would forever alter humanity.
sounds like someone was privy to the WEF agenda some years a go
finish it
Ready to read more. 💖